


in inches, in miles, in laughter and strife

by infiniteandsmall



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Falling In Love, Gen, Mentions of Dave Strider/John Egbert/Terezi Pyrope, Mentions of Jake English/Dirk Strider - Freeform, Mentions of Jane Crocker/Roxy Lalonde, Mentions of most of the kids and the trolls, Nature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 06:52:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infiniteandsmall/pseuds/infiniteandsmall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They come home in the dead of winter.<br/>Kanaya promptly takes up well-nigh permanent residence in one of the spare bedrooms, curtains drawn and surrounded by an assortment of lamps swiped from all the other spare rooms. They’re all various degrees of gaudy and hideous and tasseled, but at least Kanaya still insists on tailoring her sweatpants<br/>*<br/>Rose and Kanaya through their first year back on earth. Sun and rain and winter and spring and falling in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in inches, in miles, in laughter and strife

**Author's Note:**

> I've been sitting on the end of this for a while and I finally got off my butt and finished it because half-finished oneshots lying around make me sad.  
> Rose and Kanaya are so hard to write but I love them so they are my faves. Here you are teen xeno lesbians messing around and observing the weather sounds like fun right.
> 
> Title from "Seasons of Love" from RENT.

_In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights_  
 _In cups of coffee_  
 _In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife._

They come home in the dead of winter.

Kanaya promptly takes up well-nigh permanent residence in one of the spare bedrooms, curtains drawn and surrounded by an assortment of lamps swiped from all the other spare rooms. They’re all various degrees of gaudy and hideous and tasseled, but at least Kanaya still insists on tailoring her sweatpants.

The few times Rose convinces her to go for a walk around the grounds, she bundles herself in one of Rose’s handknitted wool sweaters, turns up her nose at the bulky florescent blue parka Rose offers, and stares at the dull grey sky and muddy slush around the flowerbeds with sharp yellow eyes that melt glass until Rose relents and agrees to inside with her to mess around with cocoa powder and cinnamon and milk.

Sometimes the clack-clack of the sewing machine keeps Rose up. Half the time, only part-lucid, she’s convinced it’s her mother, staying up through the night to make her some kind of terrible beribboned beruffled frock made of expensive but scratchy cloth hand-dyed a particularly noxious pepto-bismal pink. She then lies there, apathetically attempting to seethe and think of some kind of suitable payback (buying her a priceless but ultimately useless antique sewing machine, perhaps?).

She putters around the kitchen, sharp yellow light over the sink and shadowy cupboards, the house hushed and still around her, soft windy noises of the roar of the gas and the hiss of the teakettle and the creak of the floors. Two cups of hot Earl Grey, a few almond cookies on a tray, snow glinting in the square of light from the window.

Kanaya’s hunched over the sewing machine, the room rich with velvet and dark corners. Her hair’s matte and when she looks up at Rose, the emerald green bloodshot lines of her veins running through her sclera combines with the yellow to make a sort of muddy color around the rims of her eyes.

“I brought you some tea,” Rose says, setting it on the side table.

“Thank you,” Kanaya says, giving a crooked tired-half grin and absently wrapping a strip of tossed-aside lace around her fingers.

In her black and red silk pajamas, she blends in with the tapestries hanging on the wall, wrists and ankles small ghostly wisps sticking out from her pantsleg and sleeves. She’s not glowing, but she’s not grey, either, just white as the plastic of the sewing machine.

“Tell me,” Kanaya says. “Is it always like this here?”

“What do you mean?” Rose says carefully, settling down crosslegged on Kanaya’s bed. The comforter’s not even creased and cold air puffs around her as she sits. Kanaya hasn’t slept tonight. “

“Is it always cold, and also dark?” She sits backwards in her chair, chin on the top slat of the backrest, fingers curling around her teacup.

“No. Sometimes it’s hot and bright, and sometimes it’s nippy but sunny. Sometimes it’s so rainy the sky is black.” Rose says. She’d read books and talking to Kanaya often about Alternia on the meteor. The weather had been unchanging, dark cool nights and burning bright days. Sometimes the wind blew to the north, sometimes to the south, but it never brought storms off the sea.

Kanaya shivers almost involuntarily, eyes screwing shut.

Something burns in Rose’s throat, but it’s not her tea, slightly lukewarm with cream.

“I promise, winter will be over soon,” Rose says.

Kanaya smiles. “I miss the sun. The way it burned on my skin,” she says, and her eyes are still closed, but softly. “Not like hot water. Like fire, pulling the cold out from inside you.”

“Maybe we’ll have a sunny winter day,” Rose says, small comfort, like hot tea when someone’s chest is ice. “’It makes the snow shine.”

“Snow.” Kanaya says, wrinkling her nose, and it’s so unselfconscious and here, and now, and Kanaya, that Rose can’t help it. She leans forward and tips Kanaya’s chair a little bit towards here and kisses her, her lips warm with tea and sweet with sugar and bitter with herbs. 

“Come to bed,” Rose says, half a question.

Kanaya shakes her head. “Not now,” she says, spinning herself straight in the chair again and investigating the tea tray.

“Are these good?” She says, fingers closing inquiringly around an almond cookie.

“Delicious,” Rose says. The last few drips of heavy cream ring the bottom of her cup. She curls up underneath the comforter while Kanaya sucks crumbs off her slim papery fingers, nails so dark green shiny they look like they’ve been enameled.

“They are delicious,” Kanaya says, smiling at Rose as though she rather likes the look of her on her pillowcase.

Rose falls asleep to the steady clack-clack-stomp of the sewing machine and Kanaya’s soft humming.

It’s as though she thinks that if the curtains are closed, if she doesn’t see the close claustrophobic dreary sky, she can pretend that it’s sunny and act as though it is. As though the too-oily lamplight, burning filament, isn’t a cheap imitation of a burning star.

Some nights Rose wakes up to find the other side of the bed still cold, Kanaya perched on the windowsill wrapped up in the velvet curtains, as if watching for the sun to come around the bend of the horizon.

 

That was winter. Kanaya still wouldn’t open the curtains when April rolled around, muddy tired grass and still thin air.

“It is warmer, but it is also still grey,” she says. “If this is what you think is sun, then you humans might as well go live underground.”

“This isn’t sun,” Rose assured her, but Kanaya just sniffed and jabbed a suspicious finger at the glass of the bedroom window, before yanking the red velvet over the view of the back garden again.

Then the cherry trees began blossoming.

 

One was right underneath Kanaya’s window, close enough that it tapped on the glass whenever the wind was strong, and as the days got warmer and dryer, Rose would often walk in to find the smell of spring blowing into the room Kanaya sitting cradled between two branches, looking up at the haze of pink flowers around her as if she was a bird planning where she’d build a nest.

“It’s like sitting in cotton candy!” Kanaya calls on a particularly drippy day that makes dampness settle into the thick plush of the rugs and couches.

“Did you lick them to find that out?” Rose says, leaning out the window into the soft damp brush of petals on her face.

Kanaya laughs and pats the branch next to her. “Come out and sit,” she says.

Rose typically doesn’t sit in trees in the rain, especially when she has a nice velvet skirt on, but she can’t say no with Kanaya grinning so wide that the points of her incisors creep over her bottom lip.

The wood’s rough and cold digging into her thighs, but Kanaya’s hand is warm in hers.

 

The rain cleared up, the fog rose into the sky and burned away in the sun, the grass was speckled with white velvety clover, and Kanaya loved the dark damp dirt of the flowerbeds.

Rose was no longer the one tugging her out for a walk around the grounds; it was the other way around. Umbrella twirling forgotten behind her, she runs down the damp brick paths carved through the overgrown lawns, Rose’s borrowed pink rainboots throwing up puddles of water. The pale sunlight that creeps wanly between the budding tree branches catches on her dark glossy hair and the fine tulle of her cherry-red skirt, the short fluffy one she’d sewn to fall around her hips like petals around a stamen.

Kanaya is vaguely horrified by the twisted woody boughs of the magnolias, the tangle of weeds around the bases of the peach trees, the ivy that was strangling the rosebushes.

“No-one’s done any weeding around here for quite a while, I’m sure,” she says, crouching to pull a handful of dandelions leaves out of the way of the soft green fingers of daffodil sprouts.

“How did you know which one was the weeds?” Rose says.

Kanaya shrugs before she cocks her head to one side and considers the question. “They looked less comfortable,” she says at last, and taking Rose’s hand, her fingers cold and wet from the rainwater still caught on the undersides of the leaves, she pulls her down the path towards the orchard.

“You’ll have a lot of different kinds of fruits, won’t you?” Kanaya says.

“A regular fruity rumpus,” Rose says. “Better call the sheriff while you still can.”

Kanaya makes two finger guns and waggles both them and her eyebrows, a gesture she learned and perfected under Jake’s tutelage. She completes it with a wink, saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this rumpus became completely out of the sheriff’s control. He might just have to call in the local etiquette mistress, because I’m sure you could say that rumpus might grow to be downright unmannerly.”

“You could even say it was—”

“Rude!” Kanaya finishes the sentence with a grin. “However, you still have not come up with a sufficient excuse for the state of your plants, Miss Lalonde. In fact, I think I might have to call the sheriff on you, as well, for allowing your plants to reach such a state ripe for rumpus.”

“Guilty as charged, Miss Maryam,” Rose says, and Kanaya lays an arm around Rose’s neck and pulls her in for a kiss that tastes likes new grass and cherry-tree-smell.

 

Kanaya is beautiful sitting the in the cherry tree, adorable trying to scramble back inside for tea and cookies, sharp as the point of a pin late at night when she’s hunched over a sewing machine trying to finish a project, soft lying in Rose’s bed with her eyelashes flat against her cheekbones and her sore arms stretched out over Rose’s stomach after spending the day pruning and weeding and planting. She’s determined to whip the garden into shape, a sort of determination that she’d once put into planning a universe.

And when Rose thinks about it, there isn’t much difference between the two.

Kanaya is the undisputed dictator among the little budding shoots of flowers and weeds and spring onions. She culls here, plants there, thins and cuts and coaxes, continents of snowdrops and strict soldier lines of snapdragons.

Rose hasn’t ever had much of a green thumb. It all looks like a haze of stalks and branches to her, but she brings a book along and a cushion and sits on whatever dry patch she can find. It’s the perfect excuse to watch her, the way her eyes narrow as she considers whether the ferns around the statue of Zazzerpan the Bearded is achieving the effect she desires.

Rose hauls out picnic lunches of lemonade and sandwiches, and Kanaya picks the first fresh dark cherries off the trees. They spit the pits into the bushes and spill lemonade on the picnic blanket and Rose will tune her violin and tuck in under her chin and drag the bow along the strings, while Kanaya leans back on her elbows and closes her eyes, listening.

When Rose plays her favorite songs, lilting fiddling wild ones that she’s known since she was small, she can look up from the strings and see Kanaya, who sits with her chin tipped back. The fine green veins that thread through her wrists look like the lacing of venation on leaves, and she tips her face to the light like she’s waiting for it.

 

June rolls around, taking its sweet lazy summer time, brings with it apricots and sugarsnap peas, round strawberries underneath the tangle of leaves in their patch like small red buttons, mint growing in a fragrant tangle in the shade by the kitchen door.

It brings with it heat, the sun oppressive and prying like an overprotective parent. It drives Rose into the shade of a cluster of pines, but Kanaya doesn’t seem to mind.

 She kneels by the dark damp dirt of the flowerbeds, grass stains on her knees and shorts rolled up to mid-thigh. She crumbles a chunk of  clay between her hands and jumps back in surprise when a worm twines around one finger.

“What do you call this kind of wigglebeast? It looks like a very small species of snake, but without eyes,” she says.

“It’s a worm,” Rose says. “Common garden variety, I suppose. They help make the soil rich.”

Kanaya’s eyes widen. “This is your earth worm? On Alternia our worms were as long as my arm and enjoyed the taste of troll finger and toes claws.”

“What?” Rose sputters out in spite of herself. It’s such a non-sequitor that any intelligent responses, like asking if troll claws contained any sort of mineral that was essential to Alternian worm’s growth, flies right out of her head.

Kanaya throws her head back and laughs so hard she snorts. “You look very cute when you do that,” she says in an informational tone of voice, hands dark with dirt and the worm still climbing up her ring finger. “But it is quite true. I have had many encounters with Alternian worms while gardening. Yours appear to be much more friendly.”

“They are pretty much harmless,” Rose says. “Though I would keep an eye out for that one. He looks like a troublemaker.”

“I think I shall name him Wilber,” Kanaya says. “It was the name of Karkat’s lusus’ best childhood friend.”

The worm’s swaying back and forth, trying to find the safety of the dark earth again. Kanaya holds out her finger and lets it crawl onto Rose’s.

Eyeless and legless and armless, Rose still can’t resist stroking its wet back before laying it back in the soil and poking a little hole for it to creep into.

Kanaya’s watching her with a little smile in one corner of her mouth, eyes soft. “There,” she says. “Now it can go back home.”

They’re quiet for a minute, watching Wilber work their way back into the ground. Kanaya’s hands are folded on her lap, and she has a small small smile on her face, the stillness not of heat and laziness but of hard-earned comfort.

On an impulse, Rose asks, “Does the sun burn?”

“Not as much as I thought,” Kanaya says, ‘not as much as I hoped’ unspoken.

It’s summer, June going on July. Rose’s added popsicles to their picnic baskets. She knows what to do in this situation.

“Do you by any chance own a swimsuit?” Rose says.

“I have been longing to try my five-phalanged prehensile extremity at one of your human bikinis,” Kanaya says, and Rose is sure she didn’t imagine the slight rasp in her voice.

“That would be very...agreeable,” Rose says, and Kanaya’s smile is half smirk as she flicks her eyes up and down Rose’s body in a way that definitely is for more than measuring her.

 

In the end, Rose has to consult Roxy about renting a hotel room and booking plane tickets.

It is partly because Roxy was the one who originally hacked into the account that Rose’s mother had left. Rose supposes she could’ve done it if she’d tried, but considering that Roxy was, in fact, her mother, Rose figured that it wasn’t worth the trouble.

It took Roxy only two tries to get the password to the account and the only reason it took her two tries was because of an unfortunate misspelling (which was due more to habit than the consumption of the half-a-bottle-of-red-wine Roxy had brought over for a night of bonding with her ecto-daughter over finances, thakn you very much).

*tahnk

*tanhk

*fuck it

It is also partly because Rose would feel slightly guilty gallivanting off to some sunny wonderland with her girlfriend without at least inviting her ecto-mom/sibling/BFFsie or whatever other genealogically inaccurate term Roxy wants Rose to bestow upon her this week.

Roxy laughs after Rose asks, an inelegant but cute sort of laugh. “Rosie, you’re the sweetest! But just ask Janey—the beach is not for me. I fry.”

Rose hears someone shout affirmation in the background, then Roxy’s laughter again but this time sounding distant, as if she’s holding the phone away from her face.

“Janey confirms it,” Roxy says, and Rose can see her, sitting with her legs swung over the arm of their couch, with Jane calling from the kitchen with a chocolate smudge on her face. “But really, girl, thanks for asking but no thanks. My eyes aren’t the only things that’re a lot lighter than yours.”

Rose chuckles as Roxy starts yelling something to someone her end of the line (she thinks she hears a “gadzooks,” and so for the moment she assumes it’s Jake). It’s true—her eyes are deep dark purple, but Roxy’s are pale pink and sensitive to bright sunlight. Rose’s skin is pretty dark, but Roxy’s is light enough that some people mistake her for a white girl.

Roxy mutters something about “goddamn anime” before she’s talking loud in Rose’s ear again, “besides, I’m not gonna deny you and your girl some _quality bonding time_ —“

“Roxy!” Rose says, faking a shocked tone of voice.

“I’m sure you ladies make great strides in your sewing and writing, alone, in that big ole house—“

“The guest bed is very comfortable,” Rose says. “For future reference.”

“Thanks,” Roxy says, voice as dry as if she’d just downed one of her margaritas. “Anyways, I’ll book the tickets wherever. You two can rent the car and find a hotel and all that great shit like the capable seventeen-year-olds you are. I’m expected lots of pictures of you two in bikinis with crappy instagram filters.”

“I don’t even have an instagram account,” Rose says.

“I think you’re doing beach vacations all wrong, in that case.”

“I’ve seen picture from you four’s vacations,” Rose says. “You have no room to talk.”

“I still contend that the fuss over using swords in the pool was ridiculous in this day and age,” Roxy sniffed.

“Of course. We await the day the rest of society catches up with us.”

“Hell yeah, we do,” Roxy says, and she sounds satisfied. “Anyways, I’ve gotta run, time for dinner. Janey hates when we let the food get cold. Tell Kanaya I say hello and that the dress she sent me was the absolute cutest.”

“I will.”

“And make sure she uses sunscreen! Do troll vampires shrivel in the sun or do they just pull an Edward Cullen? Oh my goodness, did I ever tell you that I’m halfway through Troll New Moon? I’m at the part where Edward and Jacob begin waxing black and—“

A voice cuts her off and then there’s a sound so sharp that Rose has to hold the phone away from her ear.

“Is that a bell?” Rose says.

“Jane’s standing on a chair ringing a triangle,” Roxy says sheepishly. “Pulling her old farmer’s wife routine, I’m not even kidding, she just put on a fucking apron—I’m coming, I’m coming! Bye, Rosie!”

The line goes dead. Rose presses “end call” and smiles a smile with Dave-level-proportions of dopiness down at the glowing screen.

Kanaya pokes her head around the corner, eyes wide. “We’re going to the human beach, am I correct!”

“To borrow a phrase from Roxy,” Rose says, “we are ‘so going’ to the goddamn human beach.”

Kanaya actually jumps and spins her way into the room, hair flying up and catching on her horns. Her arms are outstretched, and Rose braces herself to be tackled onto the bed, but Kanaya just grabs the doorframe and freezes instead.

“What?” Rose says, worried by Kanaya’s wide-eyed slack-jawed confusion.

“What kind of things am I supposed to pack?” she says. Leaning against the doorframe, oversize t-shirt falling off of her shoulder, gaping and staring off in the distance as if imagining her neatly color-and-season-coded closet, and Rose is pretty sure she’s still grinning like Terezi at the sight of a new chalk package.

“All of the things,” Rose says. “I’ll haul as many suitcases as you need.”

“A valiant offer,” Kanaya says, but her voice is still distant in the way that it is when she’s contrasting the blue of that one blouse to the soft purple of that one pair of skinny jeans and trying to decide which of her scarves fall into the category of “light enough to be acceptable to wear when it’s over eighty degrees out.”

“Kanaya,” Rose says, drawing the word out and letting it fall like a cherry off a branch. She skims a hand over Kanaya’s bare bright shoulder, and Kanaya blinks and focuses with a shiver.

“We are having a room to ourselves, hmm?” Kanaya says, and Rose presses her lips to Kanaya’s neck, the hum of her throat and the pound of her heart.

 

Rose has to bounce on top of Kanaya’s third suitcase to get it to close. Dark red cloth is poking out of the zipper on one side, but Rose has not intention of unzipping the suitcase to free it. There’s a pretty good possibility it will explode in a shower of semi-high fashion as soon as the clothes get the slightest chance to spring free.

Kanaya isn’t exactly concerned, anyways. She switches her hips back and forth in front of the mirror, humming pop songs (something they didn’t have in Alternia and something she loves with a passion that leaves Rose breathless and bemused) under her breath and fluffing her hair over her black-felt-covered horns.

Rose hauls the suitcase off the bed and wheels in down the hallway to the top of the stairs, where their other four suitcases are lined up and ready to go.

There’s the faint sound of trees rustling from the cracked-open stained-glass window above the stairs, and Rose stands on the tips of her toes to rest her arms on the windowsill and feel the breeze on her exertion-hot face. Kanaya’s footsteps are quiet sneaking up behind but Rose knows them too well to mistake them for the creak of the old house settling.

Kanaya leans against the railing, wide straw hat flopping over her forehead, lavender and pale pink flowers and green leaves tucked into a red ribbow trim. She looks like she’s ready to go to the beach, not sit in an airplane for five hours and then collapse into a hotel room. Even in the dimness of the upstairs hallway with all the window shades closed so the carpet won’t fade while they’re away, there’s little freckles of filtered light scattered on her cheeks.

“Are we ready to begin negotiations as to who is going to carry the suitcase that contains more of your books than clothes?” Kanaya says.

“Are we ready to begin negotiations as to closet space once we arrive?” Rose says. “And by that I mean that I am assuming that you asked a rhetorical question because I doubt I would ever be ready for those negotiations.”

“Well, then I shall assume that you will carry that suitcase,” Kanaya says.

“I’ll assume you will carry the one with all of your romance novels and those hooker heels that weigh a ton.”

“I know for a fact that you enjoy those ‘hooker heels’ immensely,” Kanaya says, grinning as she hefts one of the smaller suitcases and begins to descend to the ground floor.

“Well. After that dig you are really lucky that I will still warn you about those stairs.”

“You haven’t warned me yet.”

“Of course I told you about the stairs. In fact, I have told you about the stairs, and thus you could even say that said warning _just keeps happening._ ”

“You dog,” Kanaya says. Her attempts to pronounce it as “dawg” are vaguely inept and also very endearing. “You sly wagbeast, you.”

Rose misses the last step and drops the suitcase on her foot. The question of who will carry which suitcase becomes as mute point as Kanaya sits her at the kitchen table with a bag of frozen corn and loads the car up with their bags herself.

It takes Rose at least twenty minutes (twenty painful minutes of throbbing toes, moreover) to adjust the fact that Kanaya is not doing this for her out of an attempt to make Rose feel guilty, to begin an elaborate contest of oneupmanship, or even out of obligation.

Kanaya is changing the radio station of the car stereo from that song that Rose hates because she—and it knocks the breath out of Rose for a second—she’s doing it because she loves her.

In all of the romance novels they read together, there’s the big moment in which the viewpoint character realizes they love the flushed love interest. Yet that moment, for Rose, had been quiet. Unassuming. She couldn’t even remember when, but it could’ve been any time, when Kanaya was bent busy over the colorful flats of perennials, or when she’d start and then laugh when her toast popped out of the toaster, or when she read aloud to Rose and her  voice was the last thing Rose would remember before she feel asleep.

The realization that at some point Kanaya had realized she loved Rose, perhaps when she’d looked up out of the corner of her eye while easing a white-rooted tangle of a plant out of its plastic container, or when Rose would lay her head on the counter and laugh until it hurt at Kanaya’s surprised expression, or when Rose fell asleep with her head on Kanaya’s stomach.

Well.

It was like her world has been picked up and shaken, like she’s been transplanted from some soggy English garden to a sunny Floridian courtyard.

She sneaks a glance away from the road, at Kanaya snapping her fingers in time to music and staring at the window.

Something warm and strange rises in her chest, something grows that she’d thought had already reached its limits. It was like being high on the echeladder and then going God Tier.

She just hopes she can keep her eyes on the road until they reach the airport.

 

By the time they reach Florida, the eight-hour time difference and the three flight switches and the four-hour layover in a teeny-tiny airport somewhere in rural Kansas that didn’t even have a Starbuck feels like lead weights on Rose’s eyelids.

Kanaya flops down on the big king bed with the fluffy comforter and fluffy pillows and foamy mattress and lets out a long sign into the sheets.

“Oh my goodness, I think this bed was worth that whole trip,” she mumbles, placing her hat on side table and plucking the covers off her horns.

“Hotel beds are one of the chief joys of life,” Rose says, not even bothering to kick off her shoes before she lies down next to Kanaya.

“Indeed,” Kanaya mutters.

Rose abandons her plans of doing the adult thing and unpacking and picking up a few snacks from the local grocery store to stripes of sunlight filtering through the slats and Kanaya’s soft breathing next to her.

Rose wakes up and it’s dark, Kanaya still sprawled on her stomach on top of the comforter. To the dim glow of Kanaya’s skin, Rose takes off their shoes and tiptoes the unfamiliar bathroom to get a drink of water. She jumps when she accidentally meets her own eyes in the mirror, and suddenly she feels the dark become tangible, closing around her like a million creeping tentacles. She swallows her water and sets the glass back on the counter so quickly it bangs against the marble, then hurries back to the bedroom.

Her heartbeat slows once she gets her back to the wall and once she can see the yellow-and-silver mix of streetlights from the hotel parking lot and the moon over the water from outside, and Kanaya’s pure white glow that seems to drip off her fingers where he hand dangles off the edge of the bed.

She pulls off her clothes, even though they are hopelessly wrinkled anyways, and slides half-under the covers.

She wakes up to the curtains open, the radio on the bedside clock playing softly, and Kanaya sitting cross-legged on the bed drinking a can of Sprite from the mini-fridge and surveying the view from their hotel room window.

Her good-morning kiss is sweet with soda and sunbeams and hope.

 

Kanaya pushes the sleeves of her t-shirt up on her bony shoulders as they walk across the street to buy cereal and milk at the convenience store, blinking into the assault of the ten o’ clock sunlight that filters through the palm trees on the side of the road.

“It’s so _bright,_ ” she says, dazed, and Rose has to take her hand so they can cross the street before the light turns green again.

“Very bright,” she says, still distant as they duck into the shade of the overly-air-conditioned 7-11, a hundred years away from the bright blue florescent overhead lights, standing not on grubby beige tile but on sand a million miles away.

The girl behind the counter, their age, maybe a little older, blue streak in her bangs, raises on eyebrow at them from where she’s leaning on the cash register behind the counter, and Rose quirks up one corner of her lips in apology and pulls Kanaya back behind a rack of mini-chip bags and gum packages.

“It is—“ Rose isn’t sure how to describe it, it’s a word that can’t be translated from one language to another, she wants to say, does it burn, does it make you feel like you’re alive again? Does it make you feel like you’re home?

“I can’t wait to go to this beach,” Kanaya says, breathless and bobbing on the tips of her toes surrounded by pretzel packs and peanut butter already mixed into the jelly, and for some reason that one little sentence translates so perfectly that is should be put in some Alternian-to-English dictionary.

Rose presses a kiss to Kanaya’s forehead, with the plastic containers of almonds and crinkly-wrapped protein bars watching in disinterest.

“You pick out the cereal,” Rose says. “I’ll get the milk.”

The girl behind the checkout counter flashes them a smile as she scans Kanaya’s boxes of Lucky Charms and Frosted Flakes. “Have a good morning,” she says as she stuffs their things into blue plastic bags.

“You too,” Rose says.

The girl smiles again, this time less like someone filling out the proper script and more like another seventeen-year-old girl. “And have a good time at the beach.”

“We certainly will,” Kanaya says. “Thank you.”

 

The first time they round the corner and are hit with the full scope of the shoreline and the sea, Kanaya’s glow flared on-and-off like a flicking flashlight for a few seconds.

Rose glances around hurriedly, but it seems that no one had noticed. Half the people here are glowing, anyways, either from some combination of very pale skin or too much sunscreen, so what’s a few blinks here and there?

She breathes out slowly, eyelids fluttering closed, the loose lines of her lips intimate and out of place amid the typical beach tableau of brown and bikini-clad college girls and sunburned shirtless middle-aged businessmen and gaudy plush towels shrieking children in neon bathing suits and colorful plastic shovels and buckets of seawater.

“Do you want to go down and see the ocean?” Rose says.

“I think I would rather stay here,” she says, sinking to her knees in the soft warm sand. Rose fights the urge to sink down beside her and does the responsible thing, carefully setting their bag aside to prevent it from being filled with sand and laying out one of their towels (Harry Potter, a present from Dave upon hearing of their impending trip. Hermione’s face was wrinkled so that she appeared to be without a nose and the majority of Ron’s chin is folded out of sight).

“Here. Come lay on this,” Rose says, sitting down with her legs stretched out on front of her and patting the towel. Kanaya stretches out besides her, with her head on Rose’s lap, staring at the brilliant blue stretching overhead, bright and saturated with sun.

Rose had brought a book, but right now she’s sleepy with sun and Kanaya’s breath is shivering against her skin.

They spend their first afternoon at the beach like that, quiet and sweating onto the towels, warm to the bone.

 

The second day they wake up before the dawn. Their bedside clocks glows with a greenish “4:16” and the stars are still visible over the ocean.

After twenty lazy minutes of flipping from side to side and at least a half-an-hour of making out, Kanaya slides off Rose’s silk pajama pants and mouths at Rose’s inner thighs with a smirk. Her breath is hot and soft and the way her fang scrapes on the skin makes Rose’s clit jump.

The sky is steely grey like fabric washed too many times by the time they abscond to the shower.

 

“I don’t suppose that broods of undead rise from the sands around here, do they?” Kanaya says as they sit on the balcony eating Lucky Charms and watching people heading toward the beach with umbrellas and picnic lunches and folding chairs under their arms.

“I should hope not,” Rose says.

“Certainly. Perhaps I should’ve packed my chainsaw after all,” Kanaya says, the corner of her mouth turning up in a smile at her own absurdity.

“I’m sure the TSA would’ve had a field day with that,” Rose says, tilting her bowl to drink the last of the greenish milk at the bottom. The nectar of youth, goddamnit.

Kanaya is quiet as she sips her own green milk. “I think we should go to the ocean today,” she says, eyes trained on the pearly luster of the sea that stretches towards the pink-tinted horizon.

“Sounds wonderful,” Rose says.

 

They set off before the sun rises. Rose brings sandwiches and two cardigans, because there’s a strong chilly wind off the sea, but the water’s warm when it rushes up to foam over their feet. They sink into the sand, grit under their toenails, shells on the shore.

Kanaya shivers and stares wide at over the sea like she’s waiting for a ship to come in.

“There isn’t going to be much of a sunrise, is there?” Rose says.

“Too many clouds,” Kanaya says, distractedly. “Shall we walk?”

“Sure,” Rose says, taking Kanaya’s offered hand.

 

They’re at least forty-five minutes from the hotel when the clouds turn dark with the speed and fury of a summer rainstorm.

The ocean looks dark dark inscrutable navy, the lightening flashes visible inside the towers of clouds, like people through skyscraper windows at night. Rose shrugs on her cardigan and offers Kanaya the other one, but she shakes her head.

People run by them, trying to head for home, but Kanaya plants her feet, facing the storm.

Her glows cuts through the gathering gloom, stronger than Rose has seen it in months, stronger than it had ever been since the game, florescent white, eerie and familiar. Her hair whips back, fiery red and orange and yellow horns poking through. She breathes deep and stands her ground.

The storm rolls in, the rain beginning, and Kanaya is wide-eyed and alive and Rose is breathless.

 

The peach trees are heavy with fruit when they return.

Late August leaves the grass dry and scratchy, but the peaches are shadow-cold and sun-warmed and juicy and delicious and sweet sweet sweet. Kanaya drags out the rickety ladder from the shed and climbs to the top of the tree to make sure she picks everyone, but Rose just takes one from the lower bough and eats it right there, slits the velvet skin with her fingernail and twists it into halves, throws the pits in the bushes and closes her eyes and savors the stickiness of the juice on her wrists.

Kanaya had been unsure, but upon seeing Rose’s look of bliss, she is convinced.

“We did not have peaches in Alternia,” she says, stroking the peaches’ skin like it is a hoofbeast at a petting zoo. “Won’t this make my mouth fuzzy?”

“I know you’ll enjoy it,” Rose says, waggling her eyebrows. “In fact, in human vernacular, peach is often used as an euphemism for vaginas.”

Kanaya snorts into the peach in her hands, sputtering out, “You cannot just say things like that!”

“I just did,” Rose says. “That ship has already sailed.”

Kanaya sinks to her knees in the grass, still laughing, her face scrunched up so adorably that Rose can’t help but laugh, too.

The grass scratches her arms and legs, but right now, peach tree shade dappling her face, Kanaya giggling into her neck, she thinks that maybe this world is for them after all.

 

Kanaya embraces the fall clichés of sweaters and pumpkin-flavored everything and walks on the crunching carpet of fallen leaves wholeheartedly.

Especially the sweaters.

It’s a beautiful fall, the trees turning appropriately brilliant shades of crimson and gold and yellow, with a perfect balance of bright blue-and-gold-and-white days and drizzly relaxing melancholy days for snuggled inside with tea. The peaches are replaced with pears and apples. Jane calls and shares recipes for strudels and cakes and pies and cobblers, all of which are delicious, through they usually end up slicing the fruit and throwing it in a saucepan with sugar and cinnamon and serving it over ice cream.

Kanaya doesn’t know how to knit, for all that she’s practically a wizard when it comes to draping fabric so it curves around Rose’s figure like water. Rose teaches her now, the press of yarn around her fingers welcome in the chill as it had been unbearable in the summer heat. Kanaya catches on quickly, but not so quickly that Rose never has an excuse to lay her hands on top of Kanaya’s a guide her through the turn of a seam or a particularly tricky pattern of knit-purl.

Kanaya dresses up as vampire for Halloween, an decision so deliciously ironic that Rose is sure Dave would cry enough salty tears to keep Terezi’s pretzels flavored for years. No kids show up at the door so they eat all the candy themselves, then make out swaddled in blankets on the front porch with the spooky orange flicker of jack-o-lanterns cutting through the dark of the night, Kanaya’s mouth sweet with caramel and cheap chocolate.

October breezes by fast as the sharp winds that scatter the neat piles of leaves Kanaya rakes out of the flowerbeds but November and the beginning of December drags, especially when the huge mansion quiets after the chaos and bustle of Thanksgiving. Between John’s pranking shenanigans, aided and abetted by Dave and Terezi, Dirk and Jake’s constant “rumpuses,” Jade and Tavros’ collection of animals combined with Aradia’s fragile artifacts and Sollux’s tangle of cords and electronic devices and Equius’ robot collection, and the crush in the kitchen as Jane bustled around trying to get the potatoes out of the oven and the green beans steamed at the same time while Roxy tried to slip brandy into the gravy...well.

Exhaustion was perhaps too gentle a term. But it had been perfect, curling up on the couch at night with huge bowls of various snack foods everywhere, watching movies, everyone laughing and snarking and yelling and occasionally crying (though Dave wouldn’t own up to it).

“Sunny LA for Christmas,” Rose said, hooking her chin over Kanaya’s shoulder after Kanaya had been sitting staring at the cloth entangled in her sewing machine for at least ten minutes. It’s strange, to touch someone so freely, for touch to be rendered so significant yet to insignificant at the same time.

“My first human Gristmas,” Kanaya says, smiling softly. “That’s why my presents must be exceptional.”

“Is this for Jade?” Rose says, touching the bright pale green fabric Kanaya is working with it. it’s in Jade’s favorite colour, but it’s most certainly not in her size. Jade’s pretty tiny, but her arms are definitely not that short.

“No!” Kanaya says with a laugh. “Jade expressed an interest in some dog fashion for Bec—“

“Bec? Oh my god.” Rose’s snort is decidedly inelegant, but she can’t help it—the image of Bec in the little green lace-trimmed tuxedo is unbearably funny. “I should knit him a little bowtie.”

“Do!” Kanaya says. “I don’t know if the dog would appreciate it, but I’m sure Jade would. I have heard through the fruit-nourishing woody stalk that a doggy wedding might be in order, perhaps sometime in March.”

“Should I put it on my calendar?”

“Bec is quite a loyal dog, especially to ladies he loves,” Kanaya says, and maybe, Rose thinks, she is talking about something other than a omnipotent, space-and-time-warping albino German Shepherd.

“Tea before bed?”

“I would love some,” Kanaya says. “I just want to finish this seam,” and, turning back to her work, the sewing machine clack-clack-clacks back to life.

Rose would enjoy some tea at this point, herself. The wind is howling around the corners of the house and her feet are a little chilly even buried in wool socks and sunk into the soft shag of the rug. However, she can’t resist one last look at Kanaya bent over her work. Her tongue is poking out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrates and her hands flash over the fabric, feeding it into the machine.

Somehow, she fits into this house, the grey of her skin contrasting and lightening the rich reddish-brown of the carved wood furniture, the green of her lipstick and the ring of red at the tip of her horn picking up shades from the Persian rug and the embroidered comforter on the bed, her smile small and knowing like a lady in a painting, hair velvet and shadow.

The winter sky’s the color of the skin at the base of her throat.

Rose heads down to the kitchen with a smile and something strange and new and certain lodged in her chest.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Also there is an 8tracks mix for this fic but I still have to publish it and link it.  
> So pointless music mix that no 1 currs coming soon to a theatre near you.


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